In the field of fleet vehicle management (e.g., delivery trucks, private hire vehicles and taxis), historically vehicles and drivers were allocated to bookings by a human operator, called a controller. The controller would be in contact with the drivers of vehicles of a fleet by voice channels (typically one shared voice channel) of a radio system, through which the controller and the drivers could speak with one another. The controller could ascertain the locations of drivers by requesting the drivers to provide their locations verbally. The controller could also enquire of drivers when they expected to drop passengers and thus become free again for fulfilling a booking. Drivers would be provided with details of bookings allocated to them by the controller verbally through the radio system. Such manual systems are still widely in use.
Automated allocation of vehicles (e.g., using a communications network to communicate with remote vehicle resources) provides some challenges, one of which is managing the vehicles such that they are suitably located to respond to demand for the vehicles. If vehicles are suitably located, then requests can be fulfilled relatively quickly because the journey time from an available vehicle to the desired location is relatively low. Automatically assigning the vehicle nearest to the desired location, however, may not take into account other factors contributing to the overall efficiency of how vehicles and other mobile resources are allocated.